That propensity to truck and barter
Apparently northern Mauritania is just a hotbed of the meterorite trade.
Though meteorites can fall anywhere on Earth, the Sahara has become a prime area for their discovery, partly because the climate is favourable for their preservation but also because they are relatively easy to spot against the sand.
This is true.
Officially, 10% of Mauritania’s population is unemployed. But many of those cited in official statistics as employed do poorly paid and insecure informal jobs or seasonal labour.
This is also true. What we call side -gigs or -hustles they call making a living.
Across the Sahara, there exists a fragmented desert economy in which hunters sell at low prices to brokers within and beyond their home countries. Eventually, stones end up at multiple times their original sale price with scientists and collectors in far-flung places such as Australia and the US. Hanoun gives an example of a stone weighing 285g that would sell for about €50 in Mauritania, reach double that price in Europe, but go for as much as $1,000 (£740) a gram in the US.
And isn’t that a lovely demonstration of Ronald Coase’s point? The initial asset distribution doesn’t, wholly, matter. Assets will end up in the hands of those who value them the most anyway.
But the real point here is that absolutely none of this is regulated officially in any form whatsoever. This does indeed mean varied forms of dodgy practice and so on. But we also do have here an international - global even - trade without the intercession of governments, bureaucracies or even any particular written down rules. Standards are entirely enforced by the participants in the marketplace itself. It’s really very close indeed to free trade, a wholly free market - assuming that we’re happy with calling something ruled only by the participants as free.
A counterclaim could be that well, that regulation, more bureaucracy, could make this market work better. Possibly, but that’s not the point we wish to make here. Rather, clearly a market can exist - an international one! - without that bureaucracy or regulation. On the very simple grounds that one does exist without regulation or bureaucracy.
Thus the claim that we must have detailed regulation of everything in order to have a European market - in teatowels, vacuum cleaners or cars - is not true, is it? We agree, we have left open the claim that regulation of everything will make such a market operate better. But it’s clearly not true that the regulation is necessary for there to be a market at all, is it?
Or even, “We must have the same standards, bureaucracy and regulation in order to be able to have a market” is not true. At which point Brussels - or anyone else for that matter - is left having to prove that their set of regulations, their form of bureaucracy, is better than just leaving it all to the propensity to truck and barter.
Which is, you know, a rather more difficult task?
Tim Worstall